Goals and Updates, 2022 into 2023

2023 is around the corner. I have my goals set before me and one of them involves regular updates here, so here we go:

1. Daily Goals - drawing, coding practice, reading, exercise. It’s a lot with a full time job and possibly a part time job in the future. There will be good days and less successful days.

2. Weekly updates here - what I’m reading, listening to, working on. Just a weekly writing practice in a public space.

3. To read more books than I purchase - which could involve purchasing fewer books, or reading more.

What I’m Reading - The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz. This is an excellent book. I’m half way into it and I have thoughts. Forthcoming.

What I’m Listening To: Mostly my music space has been occupied with a lot of instrumental covers - Vitamin String Quartet and Duomo, plus a little Ratatat and OceanLab.

What I’m Watching: I just finished His Dark Materials on HBO, and I loved it - it’s a beautiful adaptation of the books and I’ll be rewatching it soon. My partner and I are/were also watching Willow on Disney and we both hate it. There are two unreleased episodes and I don’t know if I can bother with it. I love the original movie, and part of me hopes that there’s something that will turn this series around and make the whole thing make sense - but as of now Graydon is the only character I care for at all. It feels like a parody of a D&D campaign run and played by a hoard of teenagers with short attention spans and someone’s parents iPod shuffle playing for background music. Pointing out every item that makes my head hurt would require rewatching the series and beyond not wanting to put myself through that again, I don’t want to give Disney the viewing data to suggest that I’m enjoying it enough to watch it a second time. Character flaws make for good story telling, but every character it so flawed, and the flaws collide with each other so violently that I’ve spent the entire series waiting to care that these characters are clearly going to fail.

Something I’ve Been Thinking About: We’re getting into a weird point in the evolution of culture that going to be really interesting to live through and probably more interested to study in retrospect. Whole culture wars are playing out online over AI and ethics, and it plays into the democratization of the Arts in really interesting ways. A lot of us take for granted the accessibility of art, not just it availability online but in museums and galleries. Digital tools have reformed the landscape more and made the creation of art easier and cheaper in many ways - a digital piece can be reworked infinite times without having to worry about the effect of layers on the substrate or the cost of paint or the ruination of the piece in general. AI image creation takes that all a step further, where talent and skill are also removed from the equation in the initial “creation” of imagery. What rifts will this create in the art world when it comes to medium and class and the already indeterminate definition of what art is or is not?

Something That Made Me Laugh: Like a lot of people following TikTok trends - I bought a tamagotchi to attach to my water bottle to encourage myself to hydrate better. It makes me smile, and I never had one in the 90’s so it’s also soothing a part of me that missed out on something stupid in my youth.

This would be a good time to create a 2022 in review as well, but this past year was rough. I’ll save my retrospective for a more private medium and focus on moving forward.

AI Art and the Future

I’m an artist. I work in a range of mediums - watercolor, digital, glue and ephemera, and tea a couple of times. I’ve made prints with linocut and plate, dabbled in photography and dance, and spent a very short amount of time singing in a band. I don’t question the authenticity of myself as an artist. The tools change, but the ability to make something remains.

A question being raised now is whether AI generated art is actually art, and if the people generating the art are artists.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they are not, because their status on artist is completely reliant on that one particular tool. The only thing you’re actually creating is a prompt to put in a tool - and the AI is doing the rest of the work. Remove access to Midjourney and you’re left with nothing more than a clever wordsmith at best.

Anyone whose been making art for awhile knows that access to better tools makes for better art - higher quality paint is easier to work with, better quality brushes give you better control of the paint you apply to a canvas, digital images created in Procreate or Photoshop are a world away from those created in Microsoft Paint. 

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, particularly in reference to when Adobe Photoshop really started kicking off an an illustrative tool in the early aughts and the emotionally violent backlash from artists in traditional mediums who decried the notion that a digital image could be considered “art” - there was also a rash of “artists” whose entire portfolios consisted of photoshop filters jammed on top of mediocre photography, and these images were novel and trendy for half a minute before they became worse than mundane and the community at large learned to recognize them for what they were. 

What art is or isn’t is one of those questions may be best left to philosophy, and I do have a small pile of books on aesthetics that have recently been bumped higher up on my “to read” list; and maybe now the more relevant question is “What is an artist?”  I am not a mathematician for the possession of a calculator. I am not a chef because I can pull together a meal from things I found in the back of the pantry. Throwing a series of words together doesn’t make you a writer, even if you are writing. And throwing a series of words in an AI art generator doesn’t make you an artist.

AI generated art is here and it’s not going anywhere - but once more artists start really using it what they make is going to blow these early breathes of existence away in ways we can’t image right now.

Not Dead, and updates...

I have a lot of ideas, and not a lot of time to follow through on them, compounded by focus issues. My family is convinced I have ADHD ever since my younger sister was diagnosed with it. A close friend with a degree in TikTok medicine thinks I have autism. The only thinks I have actually been diagnosed with are chronic depression and anxiety - all made worse as the world crumbles to awfulness around us. Occasionally it occurs to me that rather than trying to be a focused person who I am not, that I should lean into my "chaos" and just be more authentically myself instead of constantly trying to cram myself into an easily digestible box of a person. 

In that vein, I committed myself to creating a book - something I've wanted to do for a very long time but never had enough of "one thing" to create a book out of. But I do have a lot of "stuff", and if I'm making a book that is truly mine maybe it doesn't need a focus. Maybe I can just make an explosion of everything in my brain, just as it is. I'm extremely fortunate in having a full time job in the print industry, with access to presses and a good standing in a company that will give me very fair prices on as fancy a hardcover book as I can afford to make.  Thoughts, poetry, fairy tales, art - all of the things that are in me in print and mine.

My original goal was to have it all finished by August (yesterday) and printed by the end of September. Then I enrolled in a Data Analytics Bootcamp and that is all I've been doing ever since. I have maybe 30 pages of my monstrosity completed, and will have to finish the remained 200 over the next year. 

Since I don't  know what to do with a Patreon as a creator with no focus, this is officially becoming my accountability tracker. I have a year - 52 weeks - to finish 200 pages. 4 pages a week and it's done. Maybe five pages a week and extra time for QA revisions if I'm being responsible. 

If you'd like to follow along, go subscribe to my Patreon. If you want to help keep me accountable, invite friends. I'm adjusting my support tiers to 1$ and "Anything". If I reach 50 patrons I'll make a new tier for process videos - I've experimented with filming while making this way and it's honestly a lot of work AND VERY AWKWARD, but for 50 viewers I'd do it. 

MORE THAN ART

Several years ago when I was working in Management, I had a recurrent problem with no one believing anything I told them, followed with flippant dismissal at my later very polite “I warned you this would happen”. It was a frustrating pattern, more so with repetition and time. Two things I found that helped: wearing blue-light filtering glasses (non prescription, my eyes are fine) and putting all of my information in an excel document.

The glasses bit was ridiculous.

The excel bit was also ridiculous, but something I could build upon. I added columns of data I tracked meticulously. I created charts. It got more complex. The data sets became larger.

It all started to turn into something I enjoyed - creating stories out of sets of numbers, making those stories palatable with charts, graphs, graphics. It was something I wanted to learn how to do better. I found a program, enrolled, and five months later I’m a month away from graduating from my data analytics bootcamp. There have been multiple late nights coding until 5am, there were quite a few tears in the beginning when I was putting together my first for loops and doubting I’d be able to learn any of it at all, and more than half of the class dropped out; but I’m close to the end and it’s becoming fun again. Excel, VBA, Python, SQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Tableau, Big Data, and Machine Learning later - I’m Neural Networks and a group project away from the finish line.